About to breeze right by what looked like a typical museum reproduction of a cave with a skeleton and the obligatory saber-tooth skull lying outside, I stopped when my peripheral vision caught the figures of a man and woman working by a fire at the back of the cave. I expected to watch actors re-create a scene from tens of thousands of years ago, but the couple remained eerily still, as if they were 3-D paintings.

I quickly realized they were holograms - a high-tech twist that lent stunning realism to what proved to be a replica of an Ice Age cave where one of the Americas' three oldest skeletons was recovered. Even more stunning was finding this fascinating and informative archaeological display amid the high-rise palaces of all-inclusive indulgence in Cancun's hotel zone.

The Museo Maya de Cancun, or Maya Museum, is one of three new museums devoted to Maya culture that rose on the Yucatan Peninsula as the misguided end-of-the-world mythology built to its 2012 crescendo.

The Palacio de la Civilizacion Maya (Palace of Maya Civilization) in Yaxaba, about 8 miles southwest of Chichen Itza, was designed around the village's cenote - one of the Yucatan's many surface openings to the underground rivers coursing through the peninsula's limestone foundation - to display the fruits of excavations in the World Wonder's Cenote Sagrada (Sacred Well).

My grand plan was to visit these three lasting legacies of the 2012 hysteria, which, if nothing else, finally focused worldwide attention on the most advanced ancient civilization in the Western Hemisphere.

Until now, visitors to the Yucatan Peninsula, where Mexico's Maya are concentrated, had to journey to the state capital of Chetumal, at the Mexican Caribbean's southernmost reaches, to find a museum devoted to Maya culture. When I learned three more were being built in one fell swoop, my first thought was "overkill." But I couldn't stay away.

Scaling the plan back - the half-finished Palace of Maya Civilization halted construction in 2012 and awaits funding for completion - I began with Cancun, simply because it seemed so unlikely.

In a country whose capital was founded nearly 700 years ago, and whose ancient civilizations established a calendar and developed urban architecture more than 2,000 years before that, Cancun is a callow youth at 40 years.

It was created purely to lure tourists to its white sands and turquoise sea, but once the famous beaches and massive all-inclusive resorts became merely a fact of life, Cancun began reaching for some of the cultural connections that define the rest of the Yucatan.

With virtually no history of its own, Cancun has borrowed heavily from other regions; think mariachis putting on a dinner show or tours to nearby Maya ruins and villages.

It hasn't had a museum of its own since the excellent popular art museum, hidden away where few visitors ever found it, decamped five or six years ago for more conspicuous quarters at the Xcaret theme park down the coast.

Insight into a society

Though modest in size, the Maya Museum is a major step forward. It sits on pillars 30 feet above sea level to protect the artifacts in case of flooding, and its grounds incorporate the small archaeological site of San Miguelito, which was inhabited when the Spanish conquistadors arrived.

I encountered the cave scene, which was discovered underwater at the bottom of a cenote near Tulum in 2002, in the first of three galleries, devoted to the Maya heritage of the state of Quintana Roo.

The bones are the remains of a small woman with Asian features dubbed La Mujer de las Palmas (The Woman of the Palms). The petite lady has shifted theories about Maya origins, suggesting that the first people in the region migrated from a much wider swath of Asia, extending to Indonesia, than previously thought.

The Quintana Roo's hall gallery progresses more or less chronologically through development of the monumental cities to the south and the rise of the northern city-states such as Chichen Itza just before the arrival of the Spanish.

Along the way, displays illustrate funeral rites, architectural elements, everyday domestic objects and those used in rituals, ending with the conquest, the colonial era and the devastating Caste War in the 19th century.

Quintana Roo history

All the pieces came from Quintana Roo, including lesser-known sites such as Dzibanche, Oxkantah and Chacchoben as well as the more familiar Chichen Itza, Tulum, Cozumel and Coba. The second exhibition hall covers the broad sweep of Maya civilization and contains items from throughout the Maya world.

This gallery's eye-catching displays include a map showing the Maya's distribution in Mexico and Central America, as well as models, bas-reliefs and other decorative elements from temples throughout the region.

Particularly interesting is a reproduction of the Tortuguero Monument No. 6 from Villahermosa in Tabasco state. The carved hieroglyphic stone's cryptic reference to the end of the last 5,125-year cycle of the ancient Maya calendar was cited to justify predictions of the end of the world in 2012.

The third hall, for temporary exhibits, was showing "The Language of Beauty" when I visited recently. The Maya's most puzzling notion of beauty was the near-deification of cross-eyed people, who were revered for sharing that trait with the sun god, Kinich Ahau. Mothers hung a small resin ball in their children's hair so that it would press on the eyebrows and produce a squint.

The same exhibition explored the Maya's devotion to animals, believed to talk and possess supernatural powers. The playful coati, still found widely in the region, is a frequent presence in their artwork.

Tracing Maya path

Merida's Museum of the Maya World is a true big-city museum, crowned by an abstract steel sculpture representing the canopy of a ceiba tree. The Maya's sacred ceiba tree represented their entire cosmos, from the underworld to the human world to the heavens.

Exiting Yucatan Governor Yvonne Ortega described the museum in 2012 as fulfilling a "debt to our Mayan ancestors, to our culture, to this land and to ourselves." Its five cavernous showrooms, one reserved for temporary exhibitions, focus as much on what the Maya believed than on what they built. More than 500 pieces, gathered from a variety of sources, include textiles, religious objects, artifacts from ancient cities and everyday belongings.

These items, along with addictive interactive displays that teach visitors how to count in the Mayas' base-20 system or find jaguars, tapirs and turkeys in jungle settings, are grouped into four themes. Beginning with an overview of the Mayab (the Yucatan's original name in the Mayan language) integration of nature and culture, it progresses through the Maya of today, the Maya of yesterday, and ancestral Maya.

Where the Merida museum has re-created artifacts or entire building facades, it doesn't try to make them look just like the original. The result is a simplified version - of the widespread jaguar-mouth temple door, for example, or the facade of Kohunlich's Palace of the Masks - whose features are clear and far easier to interpret than the originals, ultimately making it easier to appreciate the originals when you see them.

A few smaller pieces, such as a Virgin Mary dressed in a huipil (traditional white dress with brilliantly colored embroidery) and a replica of a burial ground in Campeche containing nearly 200 skeletons from Maya, European, black and mixed-race people, are as striking as the towering temple representations.

Experiences differ

While there is some overlap between the Cancun and Merida museums, the two experiences are quite different. Cancun's museum, whose design by architect Alberto Garcia Lascurain is clean, white and thoroughly contemporary, takes a fairly traditional approach to the displays. The wrap-around window walls present a panorama of the overbuilt shore lapped by Caribbean waves, never letting you forget your own location and time, though the San Miguelito archaeological zone is a peaceful and approachable little ruin that seems to be inhabited by ancient souls.

Merida's museum, too, is housed in an angular modern building by 4A Arquitectos, but once you step through its doors, the outside world disappears altogether and is kept at bay until you complete your journey.

I've revised my initial opinion: The Maya civilization, past and present, is easily rich enough to support four museums, and the exhibits give definition and life to what sometimes appear to be amorphous piles of stone at the archaeological sites. Now I'm looking forward to seeing what the museum near Chichen Itza comes up with - presumeably before the next time the world is supposed to end.

If you go

Museo Maya de Cancun: Blvd. Kukulcan Km. 16.5, Zona Hotelera, Cancun. (998) 885-3842, www.inah.gob.mx/museums. About $4.60; no credit cards or dollars. Tuesday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; last admission 5:30 p.m. San Miguelito archaeological site 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Many, but not all, signs are printed in English as well as Spanish.